Quentin Davies - defected
Andrew Pelling - whip withdrawn over allegations of wife-beating
Derek Conway - whip withdrawn over expenses scandal
Bob Spink - whip withdrawn before he could resign. Now a member of UKIP.

My prediction at the start of the year that Cameron would have a bad year has remained unfulfilled, but this has mainly because Labour are having such a God awful year that Cameron’s problems have faded into the background. But losing 4 MPs - 2% of the total Parliamentary Party - in less than a year suggests a shambles whichever way you look at it.

How long before we see Cameron having to sack number 5? One MP who has survived scandal up until now has been James Gray. But for how long? The Mail reports:

Only last month, MPs of all parties were being urged not to hand out jobs to family members because of the scandal over Conway receiving taxpayers’ cash for his sons when they weren’t actually doing any work.

Now Gray, an ex-shadow defence spokesman, appears to have ridden roughshod over Cameron’s demand by putting Mrs Mayo on the payroll.

It is the latest twist in a sorry tale - and another act of bravado by the 53-year-old MP for North Wiltshire.

Last night he confirmed that mother-of-three Mrs Mayo, 45, was on his staff. “It is true, but I am not prepared to go into detail about my private life,” he told me.

In the wake of his split from Sarah, 53, it was disclosed he continued to pay her £2,400 a month from his staff allowance even though she had stopped work as his secretary two years before in order to undergo cancer treatment.

He secured permission to pay her until the terms of their separation were agreed last April. It is not known how much he is now paying Mrs Mayo.

See also: Wiltshire Gazette and Herald, Derek Conway: Shades of Gray?

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One thing that really bugs me is when people who clearly don’t know what they are talking about come up with fatuous excuses for not allowing reasonable requests. Nick Harvey MP, sadly, is a case in point. His response to Jo Swinson’s reasonable request for Parliament to allow video clips to be posted on YouTube and other websites was met by what can only be described as utter stupidity:

Mr Harvey, who is also a Lib Dem MP, replied that copyright of the pictures was an issue, as was the cost of filming.

He said the rules dated back to when cameras were first allowed into the chamber, in the 1980s.

MPs, he added, were allowed to use clips for their own website if they showed them speaking - or a reply from a minister to their own question.

They were not permitted to show clips on “any third-party hosting website”, however.

Mr Harvey said: “At the moment the rule is that the clips can be streamed to be viewed in real time, but not downloaded in such a way that they can be manipulated at a future point.”

How is this stupid? Oh let me count the ways. To start with, what is the precise difference between an MP’s website and a “third party hosting website”. Does that apply to ePolitix’s dreadful homepages for MPs? What about Prater-Raines, the hosting service most Lib Dems use for their own websites? What is the fundamental difference between them and a YouTube channel? I suspect you can count the number of MPs who host their own websites on the fingers of one hand.

Secondly, downloading footage on YouTube is the best way to prevent them from being “manipulated at a future point.” YouTube converts footage into flash files, which apart from usually being of low quality, cannot simply be imported into editing software in the way that windows media files and Quicktime files can be. If an MP hosts their own footage using these formats they are far more vulnerable to future manipulation. But it’s a daft reason anyway because if it is live streamed at any point, it can always be saved and manipulated in the future. Therefore, this is a reason to shut down BBC Parliament, not for disallowing films on YouTube.

What really bugs me about all this though is that we’ve already been through all this. Not long ago, Harvey’s committee was playing silly buggers over TheyWorkForYou and using very similar arguments for why this website should be shut down. The question over the use of footage could and should have been resolved then. They had another opportunity over the Puttnam Report. Three years down the line and they are still being obstructive. The House of Commons Commission was also where the dreadful Freedom of Information (Amendment) Bill - happily defeated last year - came out of. And all this on the same day that the police rule out an inquiry over the Derek Conway scandal due to a “lack of systems in this case to account for MPs’ expenses.” Which committee is responsible for those systems? Step forward Mr Harvey.

In short, this committee consistently fights to defend the exclusive, clubable air of Parliament and blocks attempts at greater openness, transparency and accountability. It isn’t really Harvey’s fault that he is the unacceptable face of Parliament - it is the Commons as a whole that appoints this damnable committee. But after the last couple of months, it is perhaps time for a new broom. Such a shame that far from calling for this, Nick Clegg has been spending so much of his time of late defending the Speaker and thus the status quo. So much for being anti-establishment.

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Over on Lib Dem Voice, Jo has accused me of changing my tune. I disagree, but I will happily admit to allowing a glimmer of optimism cross my mind over the course of this evening as the events of Ed Davey’s protest and the subsequent Lib Dem Commons walkout begin to percolate through my mind.

Superficially, this doesn’t strike me as much more than a stunt. Flouncing out of the Commons only to meekly return to dutifully either back the government line or passively do so by abstaining (the result is the same) is not radicalism. It is empty posturing and attention seeking borne out of a desire to communicate a policy that public simply does not understand and has little sympathy for.

But it has occurred to me that it is just possible (I emphasise the word just - I’ve been disappointed before) that the Lib Dem front bench have actually realised quite what a strong position they are in and are pressing their advantage. If this storm in a teacup were allowed to escalate, and Nick Clegg quite clearly stated to Brown that he must either allow a vote on an in/out referendum to go ahead or the Lib Dems will back the Lisbon referendum, he could come out of this showered in glory. Either the government will capitulate and force the Tories to choose between joining Labour in the division lobby to vote against what would then be the only referendum on offer (indeed a referendum that a significant number of them would prefer anyway) or the government will hold its ground and risk losing the vote on the Lisbon referendum. Either way it amounts to a Lib Dem win (or at the very worst a score draw).

The speaker has upped the ante by rejecting this amendment (rather discourteous given Clegg’s obsequious endorsement of him yesterday). The Lib Dem front bench’s option is simple: raise the stakes or fold. For Clegg to do this he will need a brass neck several inches thick as it will make him the least popular MP in Westminster since Kennedy lead the Lib Dem opposition to the Iraq invasion. It would certainly silence my criticism of his handling of this issue and I suspect it a lot of others would be becalmed as well.

If this isn’t the game plan though, all the excitement that so many of my party colleagues are indulging is distinctly misplaced. The symbolism of Davey holding his ground will look completely empty in the cold light of day.

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If MPs do vote to committing themselves to declare it whenever they employ family members, surely this would be effectively a vote of no confidence in Michael Martin? After all, this will pre-empt his own longer term inquiry.

It should be remembered that David Maclean’s Freedom from Information Bill, which with the Labour and Conservative front benches’ initial passive assent very nearly became an act last year, came out of proposals by the Speaker Committee. If these proposals had been passed, the fallout from the Conway affair would have been worse by several degrees. Meanwhile, Maclean is part of the review being conducted by Martin - it doesn’t bode well.

As with Prescott, a lot of the criticisms of Michael Martin smacks of snobbery. Regardless of his accent however, he is a part of an establishment that is clinging desperately to the idea of Parliament being an aloof club. In short, he is emblematic of many of the problems we face in politics today.

As an alternative, how about… Ming Campbell?

Meanwhile, under the category of “MPs do love to take the piss sometimes”, here’s a heartwarming tale of a prodigal son being welcomed back into the fold (hat tip: Duncan Borrowman).

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Say what you like about the Labour government, they are experts at the art of splitting the difference. Even when they lose, by and large they win. For example, the existing rules on allowing terrorist suspects to be locked up for 28 days without charge was a “compromise” eked out of the last time they tried getting their 90 days proposal through.

It looks as if the Labour backbenchers are in no mood to fall for that one again and enough of them will join the Lib Dems and Tories to block the 42 days proposal. But is that the whole story? I was not, for example, previously aware that the counter-terrorism bill included scope for Home Secretaries to ban coroner juries with a stroke of a pen in the interests of “national security“. It sounds like a dreadful idea, but in the kerfuffle over 42 days, how much attention will be paid to it? And for that matter, how many other clauses in this bill are we likely to be concerned about?

Could it be that Jacqui Smith is prepared to lose “42 days” so long as the debate surrounding it succeeds in obscuring all the other bad laws she intends to get through the backdoor? Scrutiny in the Lords can only block so much.

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Yesterday, the media got itself into a tizzy over a story about Alan Johnson that I’m pleased to see most Lib Dem bloggers seem entirely unimpressed by.

Today, Derek Conway MP has been suspended from Parliament for two weeks for apparently defrauding the taxpayer out of £40,000 to pay his kid’s pocket money at university. That’s ignoring the £22,000 he claims for a second home despite his constituency being 12 miles from Westminster (hat tip: Duncan Borrowman).

There does seem to be a certain level of hypocrisy at work here. Government ministers are being hounded, and in one case hounded out of office for not taking the law on donations seriously enough and being a bit stupid, but even in Hain’s case there doesn’t appear to have been any serious corruption. Meanwhile Conway appears to have been lining his own pockets without the media paying any attention until now. This isn’t hubris or incompetence but good old fashioned corruption. Shamefully, it took a BNP member to issue the complaint (anyone know if Michael Barnbrook is any relation to gay porn film-maker Richard?).

If Hain’s cock up was severe enough to lose him his job (and I’m not saying it wasn’t), then Conway’s behaviour warrants far greater punishment. If any sleaze scandal ought to involve Scotland Yard, it’s this one.

At the very least, will Cameron withdraw the whip and force him to be deselected?

UPDATE: I’ve been asked to clarify that Conway hasn’t actually been suspended from Parliament yet.

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I’ve just been reading the two interviews that Iain Dale has just flagged up about his new Politico magazine. It’s an interesting business model - effectively The House Magazine with bite.

The House Magazine has to be one of the most interminable publications going. Ostensibly a way of hoovering up lobby cash in the form of advertising they rarely bother to make their content interesting at all. I was particularly outraged earlier this year at work to get a phonecall from one of its sister publications offering to “sell” us space for an article on one of our campaigns which they had got a government minister to write an article criticising. They were effectively blackmailing a small NGO and if we didn’t happen to be both better at communicating with MPs directly than them and keenly aware of that fact, we might have fallen for it (we won the campaign).

I don’t know any MPs who admit to avidly reading the House beyond the merest of occasional flickings through - God knows they shouldn’t have the time. But a slimmer, easier read might be more of a likely prospect.

The thing that I’m most keenly aware of with blogging is that although very few people read websites such as this, it tends to be political obsessives who, relatively speaking and with plenty of exceptions, are relatively high up the greasy poll compared with the average punter. It’s one of the reasons I can only laugh when people decide to lecture me about making this website more accessible “to the voter”. I don’t have any obligation to reach out to the voter and it isn’t my job to. Even Iain’s website with its 10x bigger readership is consumed by comparatively few “normal” people. With all due respect to the people out there who do indeed strive to use their blogs as a communications tool with their community (and I’m not saying that’s a wasted exercise as local communities have movers and shakers as much we have at a national level), blogging with an overt focus on trying to appeal to the average voter is doomed to failure.

But talking to the “right” people can be very effective indeed. If that’s Iain’s pitch, I can see him selling a lot of advertising space at the expense of Dod’s. Of course, that’s when the tricky part starts. Iain is very quick to emphasise that the magazine will be cross-party, but what will he be doing to ensure that the advertising tail doesn’t end up wagging the dog? If you don’t have a six-figure lobbying budget you don’t exist as far as Dod’s is concerned. One of the things I’ve liked most about 18DS is that it opened the door to a much wider range of voices. Will The Politico have a similar philosophy?

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You’ve got to laugh. Ben Goldacre writes:

In the case of this Minority Report on abortion, it’s a rollercoaster ride of pseudoscience and dubious data, signed by one Tory MP with the support of one other, and I highly recommend giving it a read. I’ve posted the PDF here, until it appears on the parliament website.

If you want a good example of how spectacularly weak the evidence behind this “Minority Report” is, then you need look no further than the bit where they talk about, er, well, me, bafflingly.

What Dorries and Spink are complaining about is that Goldacre used publicly accessible evidence to attack the credibility of vacillating “expert” Professor John Wyatt. In his Guardian column on Saturday. Parliament operating policies of openness and transparency? Outrageous!

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Jonathan Calder asks a pertinent question about this story: Why doesn’t the BBC name Emily Thornberry?

As he says, the matter is published on the Parliament website. It’s a bit odd when the BBC are being even more secretive than Parliament.

I’m not clear whether this is intended to protect her or mischievously give the story legs.

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According to the BBC, Jack Straw today is to announce plans “allowing MPs to scrutinise public appointments and choose bishops.”

Sounds good to me. I think it should be Lib Dem policy to make Richard Dawkins the next Archbishop of Canterbury.

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